‘Minecraft 1.8’ Teaser Images

Fans have eagerly been awaiting the Minecraft Adventure Update for more than a month now, which is set to be playable at PAX this year. Information has been purposely scarce about the fabled 1.8 update, with Mojang keeping a tight-lip about features, having not said anything since June. Today, however, two images sprang up over Twitter which give away plenty of new details about what next Minecraft update brings to the table. We’ve got the images here, though they raise more questions than they answer!

Notch himself posted a picture of an extremely tall Minecraft world, stating that he was working on a level generator for heights up to 512 units tall. The default height is currently 128, though Notch is adjusting settings so that you can easily change this if you want to. By more than tripling map height and potentially setting the ground level three times as high, you could be digging caverns for much longer before you hit the bottom — it’s a long way to the diamond layer, folks. Alternatively, you can have wondrous mountains piercing the sky, perhaps linking to the so-called “Sky Dimension.”

Likewise, Jeb has been playing with his Twitter followers lately, teasing them about posting information. Today, however, he seems to have looked into the puppy-dog eyes of the masses and was unable to stop himself from giving us a tasty teaser — one of the new food items, chicken.

While chickens have thus far only been good for eggs and feathers, it was always a little strange that such a viable food source could never be used as such. Now, it seems, we can catch and cook our feathery friends to aid our cause. We’re not just talking about health here, either. Take a look at the two screenshots, and see if you notice anything different about the user interface:

Yes, a food bar is now on the right-hand side of your health bar! Like in the hardcore mode of Fallout: New Vegas, it looks like your adventurer will have to keep eating if he wants to stay alive — no more week-long mining adventures armed with only a pickaxe. This feature would make perfect sense in a game like Minecraft, where basic survival is an essential part of the experience. It’s also likely that cooking food will increase how many increments of your hunger will go away, making setting up camp a handy, and necessary, option.

There’s another long bar underneath both the health and food bars, but as of yet there’s no indication about what it could possibly mean. Magic? Stamina? Strength? Tiredness? While it looks like we’ll have to wait to find out for sure, we invite you to speculate on what Mojang are cooking up in their office right now.

With the 1.8 Adventure Update making lots of progress, we’ll probably see it sometime after PAX at the end of August. In the meantime, we’ve got 1.7 to play with – and that ain’t bad at all.

What do you think about the Adventure Update images? Are you excited for the 1.8 update?